Barclays Announces New Global Head Of South Asia Community

Barclays has announced that it had promoted Vikram Malhotra to Global Head of its Global South Asia Community (GSAC) business.

In his expanded role, Malhotra will have overall responsibility for the GSAC teams in Dubai, London and Singapore. He will continue to report in to Srinivas Siripurapu, who is Head of offshore Africa, South and Southeast Asia.

Malhotra joined Barclays in February 2010, as Head of South Asia for the wealth and investment management division of Barclays. Under his leadership, Barclays has seen the size of its South Asian team in Asia triple, and assets under management double yearly since 2010.

'Vikram has been instrumental in building up the South Asian business. We continue to see strong growth momentum, and expect assets under management to grow north of 40 percent annually over the next two years. We already have the largest team of bankers serving this community, and will continue to build up our teams globally to meet the needs of our sophisticated client segment', said Srinivas Siripurapu, Head of offshore Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Barclays.

The Global South Asian Community is an important segment. There is a 25 million-strong Indian diaspora, with Datamonitor estimating the net worth of this segment at US$1 trillion. Potential total wealth of the Global South Asia community is estimated at US$500 billion.

'Clients in the South Asian community are typically financially savvy investors. While they invest globally across all asset classes, they have a bias towards their home country given their understanding of the local market and connection to their roots. They also tend to be more open to tactical opportunities in areas they are familiar with, such as currency options. As a unified global team, we look forward to leveraging the immense synergies across the various centres and bringing to clients compelling investment ideas and opportunities', said Malhotra.

Barclays has seen significant interest from the Global South Asia Community in the FX, vanilla swaps and structured swaps space. Its enhanced margining/netting system and straight through processing has been a draw for many clients, alongside its industry leading FX advisory team and open architecture platform which provides clients with the most competitive FX pricing.

Barclays is also one of the few private banks to offer swaption trading capability. It can do almost any non funded trade for a client under the umbrella of a structured swap. This allows sophisticated investors to book a number of exotic payoffs, such as Interest Rate Range Accruals in swap format, Equity Linked structures in swap format, commodity swaps and options